How PalmPilot Became a Hacker Cult

Chris Oakes
02.20.98

On its way to becoming the best-selling hand-held computer of all time, the 3Com PalmPilot has spawned an intense, emotional, and fanatical developer following not seen since the glory days of the Mac.

"It's a grass-roots development effort that has been carrying the Pilot so far," confirmed Steve Gribble, a member of a research team at UC Berkeley that developed Wingman, a Web browser for the device.

There are now more than 1,000 applications available for PalmPilot - essentially a datebook and contact manager - with 50 to 100 new programs appearing weekly. Some are handy, some spurious, and others seem like exercises in pushing the unit to its very limits.

Kate Purmal, 3Com's director of strategic alliances, partly attributes the phenomenon to the Mac. PalmPilot shares a chip family with the early Macintosh line - Motorola's 680X0.

"[Metrowerks] Codewarrior was the leading Mac development tool," said Purmal. "They were already using it, so it became the first platform for development." With that, she said, the PalmPilot naturally attracted the Mac fanatic element.

Witness one of the results: "What would be really great is a chromatic tuner which could be used for any musical instrument," noted one poster to Usenet's comp.sys.palmtops.pilot discussion group. Fellow Piloteers soon pointed him to FretBoard, software that turns PalmPilot into a tuner for any stringed instrument.

The Mac-loyal PalmPilot developers were soon paralleled, Purmal said, by a Windows development camp that was scrambling to hack together its own tools for Windows-based PalmPilot development. To 3Com's astonishment, within two weeks of PalmPilot's debut, there were already 50 PalmPilot applications posted on the Web.

"Without any support from us, a couple of guys had created these tools," Purmal said, referring to what fast became an independent effort to reverse-engineer existing PalmPilot applications. The company had released the source code for those applications to the Net.

"When those tools hit the Web, suddenly there was this huge spike in PalmPilot development," Purmal said.

Wingman, the graphical Web browser, was one project riding the wave and pushing the little unit to the limit of its capabilities.

Once snapped into a modem, PalmPilot was already capable of simple text-based Web browsing. But with only one megabyte of memory and a black-and-white display, the unit wasn't exactly graphical. The Wingman team at UC Berkeley came up with a "split browser" design to solve the problem.

That design shouldered the more taxing browser functions over to a proxy server, thereby leaving only page-display duties to the PalmPilot itself. The resulting remarkably potent application needed only 32 kilobytes of memory.

In another clever hack, Wingman's developers achieved grayscale graphics from an operating system limited to one-bit-per-pixel, black-and-white display. The app leverages the two-bit-per-pixel display performance that the team discovered the unit's hardware is actually capable of. Now in beta release 1.5, Wingman has seen tens of thousands of downloads.

Call it calculated market research or plain luck, but among its users, the three-by-five-inch PalmPilot is blessed, it seems, to be just what they wanted it to be. Finding a sweet spot in a market where no product had been before, the PalmPilot has resulted in something of a phenomenon that by last November had found its way into more than a million shirt pockets.

The Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science cites the PalmPilot as the most recent example of strong "customer advocacy behavior" and "fanatic supporters." PalmPilot owners, the journal said, are happy to submit their names and preferences to 3Com, put themselves on mailing lists for additional products, and return frequently to the company's Web page. The unit has thrived on word of mouth, the study said.

And while the masses scribbled on their PalmPilot screens, hackers were pushing the gadget into a bona fide development platform. This, despite the fact that there weren't even any development tools available for the unit until six months after it shipped.

Kenny West, president of PalmPilot Gear, a popular hub for PalmPilot hardware, software and accessories, cites a terminal emulation program as being among the more bizarre Pilot creations.

"A terminal emulation program - who would have ever thought of doing that on something this small?" West said.

Nonetheless, one PalmPilot user employed a PalmPilot emulator to communicate with the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft. "He was actually logging into to some computer at NASA," said West. "Whenever he was updating things he was updating it with his Pilot."

There is even a project under way by members of the Linux operating system community to port a version of the Unix-based OS for the PalmPilot, though the team admit it's far from ready for prime time.

Meanwhile, some of the discussion over in comp.sys.palmtops.pilot centers around what the posters say is a looming religious war between the PalmPilot and Microsoft's planned Palm PC - with myriad suggestions for pre-emptive strikes, from a better display to product placement in James Bond movies to increased licensing. 3Com already has licensing deals in the works with three companies, including IBM, which is selling the WorkPad, a PalmPilot clone.

The emotional attachment to the product - and the anti-Microsoft sentiment among many of its followers - is certainly undeniable. Some devotees say that the very absence of Windows CE on the PalmPilot is credited for a good deal of its popularity.

"For a handheld, [Windows CE] is not very practical," said Jay Leber, the leader of PalmPilot user group based in Boulder, Colorado. "You don't want to manage files - you don't want to go to that level."

Rick Broida concurs. Broida is the editor of Tap, a printed journal covering the PalmPilot and its clone, the IBM Workpad.

"A big part of [the PalmPilot's success] is that this product has nothing to do with Windows," Broida said. "From a user standpoint, there's no 'Start' button - there's no [Windows] Explorer."

What there is, Broida said, is a fast and easy-to-learn interface where one tap on a button instantly pops up the application you need. Better yet, he noted, it rarely crashes.

Meanwhile, it isn't just in non-commercial development that the PalmPilot is attracting a diverse development crowd. The Windward Group, a software developer, is designing custom software for PalmPilot, including a data collection application provided for a survey taken of people trying to quit smoking.

"It's definitely really starting to take off as a platform," said Windward president Doug Engfer.

While 3Com attributes much of the product's success to good design, the company's Kate Purmal gives much credit to the value of the fanatical developers.

"So much of it has to do with the product itself, but the fact that developers fall in love with the product really makes a difference in terms of the creative energy that's unleashed by that," she said.